What is the Problem?

What is the Problem?

What is the problem? The problem is found in the sense that postmodernism is an overwhelming cultural paradigm shift rendering the contemporary church culturally irrelevant. The postmodern shift has effectively moved western culture away from the formulation of propositional and confessional faith, resulting in a cultural crisis amid the modernist within the contemporary church. Walter Truett Anderson asserts, “We are in the midst of a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with a change not so much in what we believe as in how we believe.” The practices of the contemporary and institutional church has been to function in the culture that was produced by modernity. With the postmodern shift the mode of replication church planting is no longer effective. In their book Hope from the Margins, Stuart Murray and Anne Wilkinson-Hayes observe the following reasons why the contemporary and institutional church has experienced fewer success and more failures, they assert,

•       Most churches which were able to plant another church early in the 1990s have not yet recovered sufficiently to do so again;   
•    Few newly-planted churches have yet grown quickly enough to plant another church;
•      The dominance of personal-intensive models of church planting have discouraged smaller churches from becoming involved;
•    A disturbing number of church plants have failed, have remained small and weak, or have attracted only those who were already Christians;
•      Church planting has generally been restricted to areas where churches are already flourishing, leaving many urban and rural areas untouched.

             Murray and Wilkinson’s claim indicates the context that the contemporary institutional church now occupies is within a postmodern society; the conventional mode of church planting is proving to be ineffective amid marginalized people. Christianity no longer is in a position of dominance in North America. Tom Clegg and Warren Bird state this conclusion, 

“The inescapable conclusion is that we must throw out any notion that God is truly at the center of the church’s heat in North America. The shift in society’s view of the church has resulted in the marginalization of the church and the secularization of society. Christianity has lost its place at the center of American life. Christians must learn how to live the gospel as a distinct people who no longer occupy the center of society. We must learn to build relational bridges that win a hearing.”8  

Clegg and Bird’s conclusion is reflective of the serious decline amid denominations and members in the contemporary institutional church. Those starting new movements are recognizing that North America is a mission field. Darrell L. Guder observes the North American experience as it moves rapidly into post-Christendom, 

“The United States is still, by all accounts, a very religious society. The pollsters affirm that Americans and Canadians believe in God, pray regularly, and consider themselves religious. But they find less and less reason to express their faith by joining a Christian church.”  

It may be concluded by the shift in expressing faith that church planting is no longer a carbon copy or imitation endeavor where a church replicates itself in another location. The Decade of Evangelism initiated in the 1990’s represents an erroneous assumption that society accepts the conventional mode of ecclesia with its basic features intact, but seeded into new soil would yield a new crop of followers. The erroneous thinking of the contemporary institutional church may be traced to earlier times when the church was believed to be the center of the community. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in their book, The Shaping of Things to Come, address the misconception,

“Many of the new Protestant church movements of recent years are simply variations on the old Christendom mode. Whether they place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.” 

             The efforts of the contemporary church have been to repackage itself and all of its activities in what it perceives to be relevant to and with postmodern culture. The result has been the propagation of church planting strategies from organizations and institutions that encourage following of various models resulting in replication of other churches. Author and church historian Leonard Sweet writes about this propagation of contemporary church planting models, “We’ve been Pullingerized, Wimberized, Hybelized, Neighbourized, Warrenized in our pursuit of what God’s ‘up to.’” Sweet rightly indicates the prevailing issue is finding what God is “up to.” The same methodology through attempting to replicate another churches successes in other contexts, essentially being a carbon copy that lacks any originality that may relate to the cultural context of the church plant. It is time the church is challenged to enter into all cultural contexts with their uniqueness and identity.